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How To Turn Off Facial Recognition On Facebook

IN THE LAST DAYS, more and more Facebook users began to see a notification about how the social network uses its facial recognition technology. When Facebook first implemented the technology in 2013, it limited its use to suggesting labels on photos. However, in December, the company announced that it would expand the scope of face recognition to notify him when someone added a photo he was in, whether it was tagged or not. If that sounds like something you’d prefer Facebook did not do, it’s pretty easy to stop it.

If you have not yet found the new notification, provide some details about the change. “You control face recognition,” the message says, appearing in its News Feed and explaining that the platform now has three main goals for the technology: taking pictures of you that have not been tagged, pointing out situations in which someone gets It seems that he knows that he uses a photo of you in his profile (maybe to impersonate or troll him) and improve the photo navigation experience for people with visual disabilities. Next, it offers a personalized explanation of whether your account is configured to activate or deactivate the function.

How facial recognition works

“Using facial recognition facebook to help people with visual impairments or as a tool to identify and combat cyberbullying is remarkable because the positive uses of facial recognition technology are quite limited to fun and authentication,” says Woodrow Hartzog. , professor of law and computer science. at Northeastern University, which studies privacy and data protection. “Now it’s interesting to see different uses; collectively, we need to look at that to see how it works.”

Many Facebook users end up submitting their photos to the massive face recognition scan to obtain few personal benefits, simply by simplifying the labelling. And, at least, the company seems to strike a decent balance between utility and privacy.

“They will not identify him using facial recognition for people who could not identify him in real life, and for me, it’s the right line,” says Chris Calabrese, vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “I feel comfortable with facial labelling in this very circumscribed context, but only in that context where it is for someone who would already recognize you.” If we crossed that line, facial recognition could quickly lose control and that could be problematic. ”

Steps To Turn Off Facebook’s Facial Recognition Feature

If you are not comfortable with Facebook’s new face recognition tools;

Go to Settings >Face Recognition.

Then select yes or no in the question “Do you want Facebook to recognize it in photos and videos?”

And although Facebook says it is not opting for everyone, you may be surprised to discover that the feature is already activated.

“The new configuration is not enabled by default,” says Facebook spokeswoman Rochelle Nadhiri. It’s true, but not so simple. “The new configuration respects people’s existing options, so if you’ve already deactivated tag hints, your new face recognition settings will be disabled by default.If your tag suggestion settings were set to ‘friends’, your face recognition setting would be set to, “explains Nadhiri.

But the preference for “label suggestions” dates back more than four years. Even if you understood enough about face recognition technology at the time to make a carefully considered decision in 2013, that does not necessarily mean you’ll be fine leaving even more in your life now. When the social network tried to add a similar tag suggestion tool in 2010, it faced a big regression, since all users subscribed automatically.

Even in this renewed drive to incorporate facial recognition, people in Canada and the European Union will not have access to features at all, because those regions have regulations on how companies can collect and store biometric data. And at the same time, Facebook has faced legal challenges to its use of facial recognition in the US. UU, For example, a federal judge in San Francisco said Monday that a class action lawsuit could be filed on the collection and retention of biometric data from Facebook.

Observers also point out that limited applications of face recognition for users do not necessarily mean that Facebook as a company is not making the most of all the biometric facial data it collects. As a public company, if Facebook can find opportunities to monetize the data or take advantage of them to boost the growth of users will take them. “Facebook users must realize that they are actively pushed towards the use of biometrics,” says Hartzog of Northeastern. “That makes the choice of exercise even more important because the inertia of modern social media is to make you reveal more and more and create an environment that continues to facilitate that.” And given the way in which Facebook handled this latest expansion of the Using facial recognition, it is safe to assume that if you choose to participate today, you will also be opting for what comes next.

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